Both the random 'Perpetual Questing Initiative' quests and the changing 'Dungeon That Happens To Be On Fire And Also This Is Somehow A Good Thing' appear to serve the same purpose - to give postgame players some further direction (and income) for their adventures. It's nice to have options to choose from if you don't overly feel like trudging through dungeon X at the moment, but when compared side by side the two systems feel a little unbalanced.

The PQI awards you 500 extra gold for winning a specific dungeon, using a specific race / class, and achieving a specific badge. This can often result in quite tricky combinations, especially when you consider that the quest will most likely ask you for a class or badge you haven't won with yet because it's difficult (or you're poor with it) in that dungeon.

The burning dungeon, meanwhile, allows you to use or repeat any class or tactics you want without a target challenge. Yet it still awards you 450 extra gold* for what is in practice a significantly easier task. Unless the PQI happened to overlap with some other unfinished quest, or indeed the burning dungeon itself, I can't imagine it feeling worth the trouble of checking with the rewards for each as they currently are.

Perhaps the gold rewards could be adjusted further apart?

* Compared to a nonburning dungeon both prepped with 'Bet on Boss', because unless you explicitly need the purist badge for the first time why wouldn't you ... which honestly feels like its own obvious-choice problem most of the time.

I'd prefer the badge requirement just being removed. I'm so sick of getting 80% the way through a dungeon and then accidentally blowing my PQI by converting an item when it wanted me to get Hoarder or something. And it happens so much that I pretty much refuse to do PQIs anymore unless the badge is Purist or Cheeky.(actually now that I think of it, I did get a PQI without a badge requirement once, but I have no idea why that happened)

As far as the differences in rewards go... if you're not taking in preps to a burning dungeon, you're still making less than just doing the PQI. If you take in preps, well... you're making significantly less than the PQI. What is hard to quantify is the "difficulty" of a random race/class/badge combo to assign it an appropriate reward (and in fact some are quite simple).

Yeah, I remember having to try this one three times; Elf, Berserker, Warmonger. In Ick Swamp. Yeah. Useless racial trait under the circumstances, can't remove barbing bushes, the acid pods are a pain. First time my random boss was Tower of Goo. NOPE! Second was Bleaty. NOPE!

FDru wrote:As far as the differences in rewards go... if you're not taking in preps to a burning dungeon, you're still making less than just doing the PQI. If you take in preps, well... you're making significantly less than the PQI. What is hard to quantify is the "difficulty" of a random race/class/badge combo to assign it an appropriate reward (and in fact some are quite simple).

Bet on the Boss. Burning dungeon tripples the trophy price, so it tripples Bet on the Boss too, which puts you well above PQI. PQI also can end up with purist or cost actually more preps because you end up with wacky class combos (ELF MONKS EVERYWHERE,ARGH).

Personally, I tend to ignore PQI for those reasons; Burning is easier and gives you more, and even without BOTB you only get 50 more gold on the PQI, for usually much less trouble.

At least the badge is never Vicious Token

Mentioning that, what about the Goatperson? Does PQI factor he/she/it in?

No. Vicious and Goatperson are ignored by it. If you use PQI and Bet on Boss it is more valuable than burning+bet on boss. But yeah, burning is infinitely more efficient right now, so I just ignore PQI.